Symposium on the Life Course
Constructing Lives and
De-constructing the Life Course
Duane F. Alwin, Ph.D.
Department of Sociology and
Center for Life Course and Longitudinal Studies
Pennsylvania State University
National University of Ireland—Galway
October 24, 2014
Symposium on the Life Course
Constructing Lives and
De-constructing the Life Course
Outline
Constructing lives
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Agency
Social construction of life worlds
Life stages as cultural schemas
Individuals and social structures
De-constructing the Life Course
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Evolution of life histories
Biological / social life cycles
Life span development
Life course events, transitions and trajectories
Demographic and epidemiological perspectives
Symposium on the Life Course
Constructing Lives and
De-constructing the Life Course
Men at some time are masters of their fate:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves ...
Cassius, Julius Caesar, Act I, scene ii
HISTORY OF A CONCEPT
• Leonard Cain (1964) initiated the term “life course” in a
U.S. Handbook of Sociology in reference to the sequence of
“social statuses” individuals occupy over their lives
• The idea caught on in the field of sociology, as reinforced in
the work of Matilda White Riley and colleagues (1972) and
Glenn Elder (1974, 1975, 1985)
• Early connections to the field of demography (Norman
Ryder, 1965) and psychology (Warner Schaie, 1965)
• The concept was recognized by the closely related to the
emerging multidisciplinary field of “life span development”
(David Featherman, 1983, and Paul Baltes, 1987)
• Most recently, it has emerged in the field of epidemiology,
in the work of Diana Kuh and colleagues (1997 etc.)
CONSTRUCTING LIVES
The first objective is to discuss several important
principles in understanding the development of
human lives:
 Biologic, cultural and structural constraints
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Agency of individuals
Social construction of life worlds
Life stages as social structures
The integration of social structures and social
pathways
PREMISES
(1) Fundamental reality of the intersection of biographical
and historical time lines (i.e. the potential uniqueness of
cohort experiences).
(2) The focus is on within-person change in biographical time
(aging, human development, maturation, gains/losses).
(3) The distinction between life stages (governed by both
biological and social & cultural mechanisms) and life course
events and transitions.
(4) The central focus on life course events, transitions and
trajectories or social pathways within and between life
stages.
(5) The interconnection of life cycle stages (e.g. infancy,
childhood, adolescence, adulthood etc.).
AGENCY
• Agency is an inherent feature of the construction of lives.
• The capacity for agency exists within the constraints of
biological ontogenesis, cultural schemas behind life stages,
and the institutionalization of transitions between stages.
• The capacity for agency—for desiring, for forming intentions
and for acting creatively—in inherent in all humans.
• We are born with a highly generalized capacity for agency,
analogous to our capacity for thought and language.
• To be an agent means that one is “capable of exerting some
degree of control over the social relations in which one is
enmeshed, which in turn implies the ability to transform
those social relations to some degree” (Sewell, 1992)
LIFE COURSE
The life course consists of a complex set of interlocking
trajectories or pathways across the life span that are marked
by sequences of events, transitions and exposures across
several life stages (or phases) that impact upon the
development of individual lives. Life course analysis focuses
on the nature and determinants of those transitions, their
timing, their linkages to events and exposures in other life
stages, and their consequences for outcomes of human
development (e.g. health and well-being). The life course
perspective assumes that these developmental transitions
and processes occur across the entire life span and are
embedded in social institutions and subject to historical
variation and change. This perspective focuses on the social
and demographic processes that help shape these
transitions and their consequences for developmental (or
age-related) patterns of continuity and change in outcomes
relevant to people’s lives, but also on the role of agency in
the construction of the nature of human lives.
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION
• Human lives and the stages through which these lives
are enacted are socially constructed, in the same sense
that we construct other social schemas, such as gender,
class and race.
• Life stages are cultural schemas that define the
meanings attached to stages of lives, and the transitions
between them.
• As a cultural schema, a life stage is an organized body of
knowledge held by members of the society/culture
about a phase (or stage) of life, e.g., old age, built up
from experience and absorbed from the culture in
which one lives.
LIFE STAGES/PHASES
Biological/Socially constructed life stages
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Embryo / Fetal stages
Infant (0-1)
Childhood (2-12)
Adolescence (12-19)
Young adulthood (20-35)
Adulthood—Middle-age (35-65)
3rd age (65-85)
Older age (85+
Socially constructed life stages
The age-graded nature of stages of human life defined
here as a set of cultural schemas has been recognized
for millenia. In Cain’s original chapter mentioned at
the beginning of this essay, he noted the writings of
Solon, the Athenian poet and lawmaker born in the
seventh century, B.C., who suggested a 10-stage life
course of seven years each, beginning with “the boy as
the unripe man,” and ending with “the time to depart
on the ebb-tide of Death” (Cain, 1964, p. 277).
Shakespeare’s Seven Ages
All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant.
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwilling to school. And then the lover
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier.
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel …
Shakespeare – Seven Ages
… And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice …
Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
William Shakespeare
As You Like It, 2.7
Erikson’s “Eight Ages of Man”
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I. Oral-sensory—basic trust vs. mistrust
II. Muscular-anal—autonomy vs. shame, doubt
III. Locomotion-genital—initiative vs. guilt
IV. Latency—initiative vs. inferiority
V. Puberty and adolescence—identity vs. role confusion
VI. Young adulthood—intimacy vs. isolation
VII. Adulthood—generativity vs. stagnation
VIII. Maturity—ego integrity vs. despair
LIFE STAGES AS
SOCIAL STRUCTURE
• I use the concept of social structure here to refer to
opportunities and constraints within networks of roles,
relationships, and communication patterns, which are
relatively patterned and persisting (see Williams, 1960).
• The idea of structure in the consideration of the life course
derives from the roles, relationships and networks located
within life stages. As Sewell (1992, p. 27) has argued,
structures “are constituted by mutually sustaining cultural
schemas and sets of resources that empower and constrain
social action and tend to be reproduced by that action.”
• Agents, he argues, “are empowered by structures, both by
the knowledge of cultural schemas that enables them to
mobilize resources and by the access to resources that
enables them to enact schemas.”
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION
OF LIFE STAGES
• Childhood
• Adolescence
• Young Adulthood [The Age of Independence]
• Adulthood
• Parenthood
• The 3rd Age
• Old Age
DECONSTRUCTION OF
LIFE COURSE
The second objective of my paperis to deconstruct five relatively distinct theoretical
traditions that approach the study of lives:
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The life history approach
The life cycle approach
The life span developmental perspective
The demographic life course approach
The epidemiology of the life course
KEY CONCEPTS
Life history
Life cycle
Life span
Life course
Even though often used interchangeably, we
consider these to be very different features of
human lives.
“A number of concepts have been applied interchangeably to lives (life course, life cycle, life history, and
life span), but each makes a distinctive contribution that
deserves notice in mapping this domain.”
Elder (2000, p. 1615)
LIFE HISTORY
Life history (a) Biology: the series of living
phenomena exhibited by an organism in the
course of its development from inception to
death (Webster’s 1996); (b) Life cycle (see
Webster’s 1996); (c) lifetime chronology of
events and activities that typically combines
data records on education, work life, family,
residence, physical health, identities, and
psychological well being (Elder, 2000, p. 1616)
BIOLOGY
Life history theory explains the broad features of a
species-specific life cycle patterns—size at birth, how
fast the organism will grow, when it will mature, how
long it will live, how many times it will give birth, how
many offspring it will have, and so forth.
From Stephen C. Stearns, The Evolution of Life
Histories, 1992, p. 10, 222.
BIOLOGY
Life history approaches are primarily concerned with
differences among species in the nature of the life
cycle and life history traits, e.g. size at birth, growth
pattern, age at maturity, size at maturity, number, size
and sex-ratio of offspring, age-related reproductive
investments, life span, and age-specific mortality
schedules.
One popular book that takes this approach is Jared
Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and
Future of the Human Animal, 1992.
Evolution of life histories
Human life histories, as compared to those of other
primates and mammals, have at least four distinctive coevolved characteristics: an extended period of juvenile
dependence, an exceptionally long life span, support of
reproduction by older post-reproductive individuals,
and male (or 3rd party) support of reproduction through
the provisioning of females and their offspring.
Hillard Kaplan, Kim Hill, Jane Lancaster, A. Magdalena
Hurtado, Evolutionary Anthropology, 2000
QUESTIONS
• The co-evolution of an extended period of juvenile
dependency and a more lengthy life span raises
several questions of the linkage between the two.
• What are the theoretical linkages between different
life stages, say the linkage between inequalities in
events and exposures in childhood to later life
outcomes?
• In what domains of life are these linkages most
apparent? Language development, cognitive
development, belief systems, deviance, health, etc.?
• How strong are these linkages, and what are the
mechanisms that produce them?
LIFE CYCLE
Life cycle. (a) Biology: the continuous irreversible
sequence of changes undergone by an organism from
one primary form, as a gamete, to the development of
the same form again; (b) Psychology: the series of
stages, as childhood and middle age, that characterize
the course of existence of an individual, group, or
culture; (c) Sociology: the socially defined, age-related
sequence of stages individuals pass through beginning
with birth and ending with death … (linking) individual
aging, the organization of roles in society … and
reproduction (Hogan, 2000, p. 1623).
LIFE CYCLE
The concept of “life cycle” has a very precise meaning
in the biological sciences. In mammals, the life cycle
is relatively simple, with individuals developing from
a fertilized egg and becoming an adult through
processes of growth. Historically “life cycle” refers to
“maturational and generational processes driven by
mechanisms of reproduction in natural populations”
It refers to a fixed sequence of irreversible stages,
tied specifically to sexual reproduction
Angela O’Rand and Margaret Krecker, 1990, p. 242
LIFE CYCLE
In the social sciences the concept of “life cycle” refers
not simply to biological changes in the organism, but
also to the socially constructed, age-related sequence
of stages through which individuals pass. Underlying
the sociological conception of life cycle is the
recognition that humans are biological organisms that
are born, mature, and die. As with other biological
organisms, reproduction is a key feature of human
maturation, ensuring the persistence of the species,
but there is an important element of social
construction that is ignored by biological perspectives
(Hogan, 2000, p. 1623).
LIFE COURSE vs. LIFE CYCLE
“The life cycle thus remains a viable and valuable
conceptual tool for studying human lives. In much of the
developing world, transitions and trajectories are
sufficiently universal and age regulated that the life-cycle
model remains a highly useful tool for social science. In
societies where such regularities are not longer the norm,
the life-course approach is the more appropriate.
(However) to be meaningful, the life course must be
interpreted in light of the life cycle—the underlying beliefs
about the shape and timing of the life stages (in order to)
understand the social meanings of age, identify alternative
pathways for life trajectories, draw attention to the strong
regularities in transition behaviors and linkages, and direct
attention to intercohort stability and change. The life cycle
thus will continue to be a valuable and necessary tool for
the social sciences.”
Dennis Hogan (2000)
LIFE SPAN
Life span (a) the longest period over which the
life of any organism or species may extend,
according to the available biological knowledge
concerning it (Webster’s, 1996); (b) the
longevity of an individual (Webster’s, 1996); (c)
an evolved life history characteristic of an
organism that refers to the duration of its life
course (Carey, 2003); (d) the temporal scope of
inquiry (Elder, 2000).
BIO-DEMOGRAPHY
Some of the most profound questions in biology are
those concerned with the nature and origin of both life
span and aging– equal in stature to those involving the
genesis of life, of sex, and of human consciousness.
One of the most important reasons for studying aging
is because it is basic to life and its endpoints—
morbidity and death. … it will never be possible to
understand the nature and origin of life without
understanding the nature and origin of both its
constraints and limits.
James Carey, Longevity—The Biology and Demography of
Life Span, 2003. Princeton University Press.
HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
At the simplest level development is the act or process of
developing. In its biological meaning it refers specifically to
growth; that is, the process of natural evolution from one
stage to another, as in the progression from an embryonic to
an adult form. In biologically-oriented discussions of
development, thus, individual members of a given species
follow a particular sequence of states or stages that result
from natural processes of growth, differentiation and
maturation. Developmental biology is the branch of biology
dealing with the processes of growth and change that
transform an organism from a fertilized egg or asexual
reproductive unit, as a spore or gemule, to an adult. That
biological development follows such an ontological course
seems incontrovertible.
LIFE STAGES/PHASES
Biological/Socially constructed life stages
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Embryo / Fetal stages
Infant (0-1)
Childhood (2-12)
Adolescence (12-19)
Young adulthood (20-35)
Adulthood—Middle-age (35-65)
3rd age (65-85)
Older age (85+
LIFE SPAN DEVELOPMENT
Through the first half of the 20th century, the study of
human development was primarily devoted to child
development. The study of adolescent development came
later. It was not until the latter half of the 20th century that
developmental scientists more seriously turned their
attention to adult development and aging—hence, life span
development. It was realized that the concepts and issues at
stake with respect to children could not simply be extended
to adults. And new and difficult questions were raised
about continuity and change in adult lives over time, about
social settings that structure movement through these
years, about connections between lives, time, and place, and
how to handle these complexities in theory and research.
Richard Settersten, 2003
LIFE COURSE DEMOGRAPHY
Historically, demographers have studied the events in human
lives that impact directly on the size, composition, and change
of geographically-defined populations, namely births, deaths
and migrations (see Swanson and Siegel, 2004).
In the modern era, in “recognizing the complexity of human
behavior” demographers have enlarged their territory, as
suggested by Ron Rindfuss’s 1991 presentation to the
Population Association of America (Rindfuss, 1991, p. 493). He
noted that topics examined by “hard-core demographers” at the
1991 PAA meetings included “caregiving, the sharing of tasks in
the household, conjugal harmony, wage inequality, child rearing,
inheritance, the empty nest, retirement, political
gerrymandering, and sexual behavior.”
Ronald Rindfuss, Demography, 1991, p. 493.
TIME
• Historical time (periods, eras, epochs)
• Biographical time (life cycle and aging)
Development, growth, maturation, aging, and life cycle
as a function of time
Life course events (e.g. transition to first grade,
transition to first marriage, transition to first parity,
transition from school to work, transition to retirement)
Age-related timing of events (e.g. age at first marriage,
age at first parity, etc.)
Other time structures (e.g. time since widowhood, time
until death, time until dementia, etc.)
• Intersection of historical and biographical time (i.e. being
born at a particular time in a cohort with particular
characteristics)
Transition to Adulthood (15-30)
Ron Rindfuss 1991 PAA Presidential Address
“The Young Adult Years: Diversity, Structural Change,
and Fertility,” Demography, Vol. 28, No. 4, Pages 493512, November, 1991.
• Fertility rates
• Residential mobility rates
• Rates of moving across county lines
• Unemployment rates
• First marriage / first re-marriage rates
• Rate of leaving school
Questions
Event trajectories—some argue that the study of the life
course is the “study of a sequence of events, that is to say, a
process which is both unintended and the result of
intentionality in which earlier events condition later events”
(Harris, 1987, 21-22). Which event sequences are
developmentally advantageous or disadvantageous?
Life course dynamics—event trajectories link states across
successive years … both within and across life stages. How is
the interlocking nature of transitions and trajectories
institutionalized into “social pathways” that define the
timing of events and transitions? And what are the
consequences of departing from “normative” sequences?
LIFE PATHWAYS
Ross Macmillan and Scott Eliason. 2003. Characterizing the Life
Course as Role Configurations and Pathways: A Latent Structure
Approach. Pp. 529-554 in J.T. Mortimer and M.J. Shanahan
(Eds.), Handbook of the Life Course. New York: Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
Macmillan and Eliason (2003, p. 530) make the observation that
despite the life course perspective’s emphasis on “variation in
the life course” and “an examination of the social characteristics
and conditions that generate diversity … (the life course is)
seldom precisely operationalized and measured.”
National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 (NLSY79). 12,686
young men and women who were 14-22 in 1979. Pathways
through education, work, marriage and parenthood.
Focus is on ages 15-16, 19-20, 23-24, 27-28 and 31-32
School and work
School, work & children
Marriage and children
LIFE COURSE EPIDEMIOLOGY
“Life course epidemiology is the study of long-term
biological, behavioural, and psychosocial processes that
link adult health and disease risk to physical or social
exposures acting during gestation, childhood,
adolescence, earlier in adult life, or across generations.”
Diana Kuh & Yoav Ben Schlomo, Life Course Approach to
Chronic Disease Epidemiology, 2004
LIFE COURSE EPIDEMIOLOGY
Life course epidemiology grew out of research in the
1980s and 1990s that “challenged the prevailing 20th
century aetiological model for adult disease that
emphasized adult risk factors, particularly aspects of
adult lifestyle.” One life course model hypothesized “that
adult chronic disease and many of its adult risk factors
are biologically ‘programmed’ during critical periods of
growth and development in utero or early infancy.”
Diana Kuh & Yoav Ben Schlomo, Life Course Approach to
Chronic Disease Epidemiology, 2004
BARKER HYPOTHESIS
Recent findings suggest that many human fetuses have
to adapt to a limited supply of nutrients and in doing so
they permanently change their physiology and
metabolism. These “programmed” changes may be the
origins of diseases in later life, including coronary heart
disease and the related disorders stroke, diabetes, and
hypertension.
David J.P. Barker, “Maternal Nutrition, Fetal Nutrition,
and Disease in Later Life,” Nutrition, 1997
Typical findings
QUESTIONS
• To what extent are the correlates between early
exposures and later health due to the “master”
sociological variable known as “social class” or “socioeconomic status” (referenced in “fundamental cause”
theories)?
• To what extent can the effects of early events and
exposures be modified by later experiences? Can the
negative effects of early events and exposures be
overcome?
• To what extent do risk factors cluster together due to
socio-economic status?
• Which risk factors are stronger, early or late?
ACCUMULATION OF RISK
ACCUMULATION OF RISK
with risk clustering
CHAINS OF RISK MODEL
COMBINED RISK MODELS
QUESTIONS
• To what extent can these various “risk” models, which
capture key ideas from epidemiology, be generalized to all
forms of human experience? Or, are they limited to
connections between health, disease and risk factors?
• Is it possible (or how is it possible) to obtain data across
critical periods of exposure that would allow one to test
these accumulation of risk models?
• To what extent do these models recognize the barriers
posed by limits on plasticity? That is, once trajectories are
in play, can they be altered by changes in the environment?
• Are behavioral systems that we care about as social
scientists largely evanescent or ergodic?
QUESTIONS
Evanesence is a characteristic or quality that tends to disappear
quickly, which exists for a relatively short duration. There is a
point of view that I like to cite in discussions of this sort,
articulated by social psychologist Kenneth Gergen (1980, pp. 3435). In Gergen’s (1980) words, “existing (developmental)
patterns appear potentially evanescent (emphasis added), the
unstable result of the particular juxtaposition of contemporary
historical events. For any individual the life course seems
fundamentally open-ended. Even with full knowledge of the
individual’s past experience, one can render little more than a
probabilistic account of the broad contours of future
development” (Gergen, 1980, pp. 34-35). In the present context
we refer to this as the lifelong openness model – representing a
developmental pattern that is consistent with a view of life as full
of adaptation and change.
•
QUESTIONS
Ergodicity on the other hand relates to the probability that any
state will recur; especially having zero probability that any state
will never recur. We can think of ergodicity almost as the
opposite of randomness in patterns of human stability, in the
sense that a particular distribution of a given trait at a given time
is assumed to be highly dependent, like in a Markov chain, on the
distribution of the trait at the immediately prior time.
RESOLUTION
BIOLOGY (Life history, life cycle and life span)
CULTURE (Life cycle and life stages)
DEVELOPMENT (growth, maturation
and change)
SOCIAL PATHWAYS (Life course)
By nesting these concepts across levels of
discourse and disciplines, we can arrive at an
integrated framework that amplifies meaning and
creates a holistic interpretation of lives within a
multidisciplinary context.
RESOLUTION
Figure 1: Intersection of Biographic and Historic Time
Biographic Time:
Stages in Life Cycle
Childhood
Youth
Middle age
Old age
Cohort D
Cohort C
Cohort B
Cohort A
1900
1920
1940
1960
1980
Historic Time
2000
2020
2040
Summary: LIFE PRINCIPLES
(1) Principle of reciprocity
(2) Principle of linked lives
(3) Principle of human agency
(4) Principle of behavioral individuality
(5) Principle of age-graded or normative features of
development
(6) Principle of cohort variation in development
(7) Principle of lifelong development
(8) Principle of life events, exposures and life histories
(9) Principle of timing
(10)Principle of temporal heterogeneity
RESEARCH STRATEGIES
• The study of the life course requires longitudinal
research designs—often over long periods of time—or
does it?
• The study of the life course requires event and exposure
measurement, e.g. life history calendars and concomitant
assessments of developmental status.
• The study of the life course requires innovative methods
of analysis, combining some combination of event history
models, individual growth (or change) models, and
event-centered strategies of analysis.
Belli, Stafford & Alwin, 2009